Park Hyo-Joo

What a gem of a show! Such a simple premise… a young, energetic dancer has a one night stand with a stranger that ends in an unexpected pregnancy – she ends up hastily getting married and follows her new husband to Germany, where he has his first professor appointment. There, isolated and alone, she sort of looses her spark and falls into obscurity, her house and home becoming her entire world as all her dreams are lost. Motherhood becomes her only solace. Her husband pushes her further and further away, until finally he asks for a divorce when their son is a teenager. They postpone the divorce until their kid goes off to college… and in a mad dash attempt to save her marriage by becoming the intellectual equal of her husband, our leading lady secretly enrolls in college. There she runs into one of her best friends from high school, who secretly had a crush on her, and the show takes off!

So much happens. There are all sorts of twists and turns in the relationships. Affairs. Terminal illnesses. Miscommunication on an epic scale. And adorable banter and humor between the adult leads, as well as all the students, faculty and staff. So much cuteness. And a really great story, too, of growing up even when you’re already a grown up. I loved it.

The more I think about this show, the more I dislike it. I will admit being biased, as I don’t care for Kim So-Yeon. She’s one of my least favorite actresses in K-World. She’s like Seth Rogan… krytonite to my viewing experience. So, I should have known better going in… but I thought, Sung Joon might save it… or Namgung Min. Nope.

The plot is basically about a young girl who was a nanny for a rich boy all through her childhood, watching this kid from infancy until he was about 10 or so. For him it was all sunshine and roses, but for her it was hell. Time jump about 17 years and she’s grown up to be a bitchy, successful producer of a home shopping network and he has grown up to be a naive, successful musician. They have a ten second romance before his identity is revealed, and then they basically switch roles from their childhoods – with him acting as the caregiver and her as the busied dependent coming in and out without appreciating him. And, you know, they slowly fall in love. I guess. You’ve also got all the coworkers at the home shopping network going through their own romances – none of which are very noteworthy. They’re so cliche and one note, they’re basically wallpaper.

One of my pet peeves is tedious voice overs – especially when they’re trying to be poetic or introspective and it doesn’t seem to match the character at all. This show was stock full of annoying voice overs of our two main character musing about life and love and blah, blah, blah. Just, show NOT tell, please. If you couldn’t get that message across in the drama, then it’s lazy writing to try to throw it on top as a voice over. Yuck. The voice overs were like those contrite memes with inspirational sayings. Also, the dialogue was a mess. There were too many instances of a character saying something that sounded way too measured and preachy for sporadic conversation. What, did they memorize this speech before hand? It felt so unnatural. Our male lead calmly lecturing our female lead about her emotional state… “maybe you’re just a person who doesn’t recognize your own feelings” was ridiculous. People don’t talk like that. Even therapists don’t talk like that. The whole show was like this. Groan inducing.

What the show DID have going for it was open mouth kissing. And quite a bit of it. And bed scenes (mainly “after” where there’s a dude without a shirt and the girl mysteriously sleeps in pajamas). It was quite frank with its sexual tone. If only I cared about whether any of them ever got laid, ever again in their lives. But I didn’t. I basically just enjoyed the eye candy and fast-forwarded through massive chunks of the eps towards the end. Honestly, I should have just watched some kiss compilation videos on youtube… saved myself from the constant eye rolling.

Overall Rating – 4/10. French Kissing Does Not Make Up For Bad Writing.